Courtesy of Timothy Morton.

We were pleased to bring prominent philosopher Dr. Timothy Morton to our audiences. Morton is one of the key proponents of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and an influential thinker on contemporary art and its engagement with ecological issues. Their book, All Art is Ecological, postulates that a “haunting weirdness” is necessary for an artwork to be ecological. Backing this insight is their thinking in Dark Ecology, which traces the recursive logic born out of the development of agriculture, leading us to our current environmental tipping point. It is thinking such as this, leading to a radical understanding of the roots of our collective crisis, that may allow us to understand a path away from the precipice.

Dr. Morton’s lecture was part of a parallel program related to our current solo exhibition Rights of Passage by Lou Sheppard. Sheppard’s sonic and video installation embodied Morton’s “haunting” as sound and image reverberated, dragged, animated, and characterized the current ecology of navigable waters in Toronto. We invited Morton to speak on their research in order to build a critical frame around Sheppard’s work, identifying a radicality that eliminated a construction of nature as other and instead understood an ecology with the rights and needs of culture.

Together with Morton, we attempted to envision how the queering of our interdependence with our surroundings can be a form of ecology within and without nature.

Dr. Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams, and Justin Guariglia. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges and is author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (Open Humanities, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 270 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design, and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 14 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.